09:55 am - It's a Lion! It's Huge!In honor of having finished The Golden Compass last night (flail!), I offer you my dæmon for you all to play with and change:

I think the first time I did it, I got a silver fox, though. That seems to fit me more than a frickin' lion. Make it a fox! Get me righter than I got myself!

I'm picking up The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass at the library tonight, so please don't spoil me! I will likely make a His Dark Materials post when I'm done, just for atropos116 and hobviously to flail around in.

The movie looks pretty cool, and now I can identify specific scenes from the book in the trailer, which is nice.

Behind the cut, however, I offer a slightly spoilery poll for people who have read the book:

Hee. I know! Wikipedia says religion will appear "euphemistically," but, er, Dust? How do you get around that "euphemistically"? It's pretty explicit.

I know the other books get even more religerrific (hee!). I want to go and get them now to read! I don't know what The Authority is, but the Comic-Con preview seems to spin the Magisterium as sort of Evil Power-Hungry Dictators or something, so maybe their motivation is...being evil and power-hungry.

It was really cool to pick out scenes from the book in the trailer! Hell, they even show parts from the very end! And then there are random scenes I don't recognize at all that they clearly just made up.

It looks like Philip Pullman has a good deal of input (having hand-picked Nicole Kidman and all), so that's heartening, but I wonder how the dude feels about having, like, the entire point of his books stripped out for a mainstream movie audience. Besides rich. (Actually, a Wikipedia quote claims he likes the screenwriter for getting that the books are actually about Lyra's story, her search for a family, which...I don't particularly agree with. I mean, Lyra is fun and all, but I see her more as a vehicle for the story rather than a character whom the story is about. Maybe that changes in the later books.)

Oh, #1 with a bullet. Without the religious plot the whole series is just going to get turned into some kind of happy magical thing about the innocence of children. I just wonder, you know, what the third movie will be ABOUT, since they're effectively removing most of the plot.

Yes, I saw THE FIGHT!! And I also saw bits of the very very end, which you wouldn't really recognize as the very very end if you didn't know the book.

What's weird about the prophecy is that Mrs. Coulter is all, "You think it's this child?" (Like she's Anakin fucking Skywalker or something.) And then she's all, "Then we must find her!" Which is so weird because, hello, you know? Maybe it's just out of context.

I'm not worried about the religion thing. I'd imagine it's not going to be explicit, but it'll be like Narnia -- you'll know what they're getting at. Even in the trailer they had one Magisterium guy hiss, "That is heresy," so, yeah, not too worried. Pullman's had a ton of input, and Chris Weitz absolutely loves the books and has promised he won't dumb anything down. I'm crossing my fingers, anyway, as these are some of my favorite books of all time and I've been waiting for the movies for years now.

Okay, dumb question. How did you get the proper code for the quiz to post to LJ? All I can see is blog code that doesn't work in LJ. I think this is why I didn't post it the last time I did the quiz earlier in the year. Thanks!